RIP Paul Steen (?? – 2020)

I received the sad news early today that Cornell Professor Paul Steen died on Friday.

I took a class on bifurcation theory from Paul, who was very supportive. My class project, in which I needed to use AUTO (an important aspect of the course), led to this publication.

Here is an excerpt from the Acknowledgements section:

Additionally, we express our gratitude toward Alan Champneys for several productive suggestions regarding the numerics, Alejandro Rodríguez-Luis for providing a preprint of his manuscript, and Paul Steen, whose guidance for this work as a project for ChE 753 (on which this paper is based) was particularly valuable.

Starting Out the Hard Way

I was the TA in the first course that Alex Vladimirsky (now the Director of the PhD program of my graduate alma mater) was ever in charge of.

Two decades later, I am still the most opinionated TA that he's ever had with respect to how to teach a course. People should get the most difficult person out of the way at the beginning, right?

He confirmed this and found out about the ducks at our meeting this morning! It’s perfect bc he tells me that when I need a debugging break, I should talk with a rubber duck, so I think the rubber duck that is living in the tex doc right now has a permanent home 😊 (for now)

— Mallory Gaspard (@mallorygaspard) May 27, 2020

What Happens in Ithaca Stays in Ithaca (2017 Edition)

I am off to Cornell to give this year's Notable Alum lecture in the Center for Applied Mathematics (the program from which I got my PhD)!

It's my first visit to Cornell in more than 4.5 years and only my second visit since I graduated!

I am at the airport way too bloody early. All of the men's bathrooms in this terminal are locked.

RIP Maplewood Park

During my entire time (almost 4 years) at Cornell University, I lived in Maplewood Park, which is being demolished this fall.

On any given day, you could walk outside the apartment and see a deer very close by.

Cornell Video: Steve Strogatz on Mathematics, the Power of Abstraction, and Outreach

Here is a new press video from Cornell University with Steve Strogatz speaking about mathematics, finding patterns through the power of abstraction, and outreach. This video is short, and it does an excellent job of conveying the power of mathematics (as one would expect from an excellent communicator like Steve).

RIP Carla Martin (1972–2015)

A bunch of us who went to school with Carla at the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University have written an obituary for her. It appeared online yesterday in SIAM News. Go read it and see how she was an inspiration to students. (I would like not to need to work on another obituary like this for one of my friends for a very long time...) Also look at our coauthored paper on the singular value decomposition.

Carla died tragically last month.

RIP Richard L. Liboff (1931–2014)

Steve Strogatz just e-mailed me to let me know that Richard Liboff, my PhD supervisor, has died. The obituary only came out yesterday, but Richard died on 9 March. The comment, which is recalled in the Cornell obituary, that Richard made about his book in the Spiderman movie was quintessentially him. (I remember that incident when Cornell first had a press release about it.)

Richard seemed pretty crazy at times (though, to be honest, I bet that my students would say the same thing about me!), and we ultimately had a falling out (and I couldn't get him to respond to e-mails after fall 2003 or early 2004), but I do have a soft spot for him --- and I have some of my own stories to tell, of course. Richard was quite a character, and Cornell's obituary conveys it very well. In some ways, this is like the closing of a final bit of my graduate-school chapter, although I still have strong contacts with many of the Cornell faculty.

Here is a link to Richard's wikipedia page. He is best known for his quantum mechanics book, of course. (Given how well-known his book is, I'm rather surprised that his obituary hasn't circulated much more widely. It certainly deserves to be. Through his textbooks, Richard made extremely important expository contributions to generations of young physicists and other scientists.)

I published my first science paper jointly with Richard. It is nowhere near my best paper, but it will always be my first one.

Update (5/25/14): I noticed that this blog entry was getting several hits, so I tried to figure out the mechanism via Google (no luck yet). In the process, though, I found something really interesting that I never knew: Richard self-published a novel! (Given the details of the Amazon page, I am assuming that it was self-published.)

Urbane Maps

Wow, the website Map Urbane is really cool. It crowdsources what people are writing about places and uses that to label places on maps instead of the names on places.

It was created by a recent Cornell alum, who posted his take on the Cornell campus today. I love the line "It's all about using the right formula" near the T & AM building. (May the T & AM department rest in peace.) I think that is one of Andy Ruina's lines!

There's some really cool stuff in here. The map for Los Angeles is meh, but the urbane map for Seoul is really damn funny when the words are translated into English. Boston has some amusing stuff, and I am sure that many of the others do as well.

(Tip of the cap to Cornell Alumni Association.)

"(And Applied)"

More trips down Memory Lane...

I walked by Thurston. At the front of the building, if you look carefully, you can still notice the remnants of the parentheses that someone once snarkily put around "and Applied" in "Theoretical and Applied Mechanics". (Those parentheses were there for at least 2-3 years.) Now, the department no longer even exists.

Also, when I was walking back to campus from Collegetown, without thinking I took my old route that would take me directly back to Rhodes Hall and had to stop myself from walking all the way there.

Well Played

It turns out that sometimes you have to be very careful about what you write in the acknowledgements (and biography and preface and the like) of your PhD thesis, because it might come back to haunt you.

When I was finishing up in 2002, I had decided that because that was the only part of a thesis that most people read that I would have some fun in it and put easter eggs of various sorts to amuse my friends and future students (and in general to just be playful with it).

Well, today the introduction right before my colloquium was a bit unusual---and not like any other speaker introduction I have ever witnessed in my career thus far. With some help from the current CAM students (actually, my understanding is that it was their idea), some of my words from that part of my thesis were taken out and used for my introduction instead of doing the usual career path and honors that are typical in such things. My host's flight was cancelled and he could only make it for dinner and had to miss the seminar, and Peter Frazier did the introduction and was thus the MC for the shenanigans. (Peter is now a faculty member at Cornell and was my classmate in Lloyd House back in the day at Caltech.)

Wow. This caught me completely by surprise. Well played. Very well played.

And I probably deserved it. :)

P.S. Some of these CAM students specifically looked up and listened to "Tarzan Boy" just to see what on earth I was talking about in that document!

What Happens in Ithaca Stays in Ithaca

I am back at Cornell for the first time since I left in July 2002 (after graduating with my PhD in May 2002). I will be giving tomorrow's Center for Applied Mathematics (CAM) colloquium. As some of you (many of you?) know, I am an alum of that program.

I am staying in the Statler Hotel on campus (of course). One of the first things that came to mind as I was entering the hotel was a friend of mine who was an undergrad in Cornell's hotel school. I met her in my bowling class my first term at Cornell (she was a frosh), she insisted on becoming my bowling partner for the class, and we became friends. Sadly, we haven't had any contact since 2003, and she has one of those ungoogleable names. This is somebody with whom I would love to get back in touch.

Update: All of a sudden, I am wondering if 'The Elevator Nazi' still works in Rhodes Hall. (Though given how old she was back in the day, I would think that she must be retired by now.)

Up All Night

PhD Comics has a panel about all-nighters.

I still pull an all-nighter every now and again, though it's certainly harder than it used to be (and I did a Hell of a lot of these in college). Two fundamental differences between my experiences and the description:

(1) I start my work early rather than at O(11pm).

(2) I want to kill everybody when they get up to start their day rather than to kiss them---especially if they wish me a good morning (and doubly so if they have been blasting country music, which was one of the rites of passage in grad school in applied math at Cornell... shudder).

(Tip of the cap to Jimmy Lin.)

Cornell's New Rivalry with MIT

The last time I checked, the rivalry with MIT was supposed to be with my other alma mater (i.e., Caltech). And what is this Ivy+ bullshit? (A bit of MIT and Stanford wannabe-ism, it seems to me.)

A Physicist's Thriller

Cornell physics professor Paul McEuen has published a sci-fi thriller novel. I have never been a big fan of thrillers (except for Michael Jackson's song, of course), though I feel inspired every time one of my fellow scientists publishes a novel. I'll do that one day too.

Paul has a few more grey hairs now, but one of my first thoughts the first time I saw him over a bit over a decade ago was that he looked like John Lennon. (I talked to Paul about some stuff related to me PhD dissertation when he first came to Cornell while I was in graduate school.)

Website Legacy

Many years ago, when I was a postdoc in Georgia Tech's math department, I kept track of the talks in the seminar series that I was organizing on an excruciating simple website. I did this because the math department didn't have a good central site for seminars at the time.

During my postdoc, a person who was organizing our PDE seminar asked me for my .html code, which I gladly sent. Many years later, this code is still being used. The original person didn't think to delete the Sitemeter tick at the bottom that incremented the count for visits to my websites. And, many years later, that still remains as well.

However, I am significantly prouder of the legacy on this page, which is the graduate student seminar series that I started at Cornell in Fall 2000. Now it's 10 years later, and my seminar is still running. And the text on the website that describes the series is almost exactly the text that I wrote originally.

(In case you're interested, I wrote an opinion piece about it that appeared in 2002 in the Notices of the AMS.)

Cornell versus Kentucky

It's amazing that Cornell unexpectedly earned a birth in the "Sweet 16" of men's college basketball. Unsurprisingly, #1 seeded Kentucky beat us. Nevertheless, here is a fun comparison between Cornell and Kentucky. Tonight at dinner, we actually had an all-Cornell table, and we watched the beginning of the game together. The game started with a 10-2 Cornell lead, but then reality quickly set in (and watching the game made it obvious even to me---and I know nothing about basketball---that Cornell was simply outmatched) and we ended up losing 62-45. In one streak, Kentucky got 30 points to Cornell's 6.

The people at dinner included me (obviously), 3 fellow CAMsters (2 of whom overlapped with me), a former Cornell postdoc who overlapped with one of the people who overlapped with me (but not with me), a former Cornell professor who overlapped with us, and a former Cornell grad student from the biometry department. We were all present in one of my 2 seminars today, 3 of the people are faculty at ASU (main campus, which I was visiting), 2 of the people are faculty at ASU West Campus, and 1 person is a visitor from Purdue. And then there's me.

I don't normally care about basketball, but this was pretty cool. I guess that's what it's like to go to a "real" school, although the fact that we were severe underdogs was a big part of the fun for me.

Congratulations to Dolores Pendell on her Retirement

In this spot today, I'd like to highlight Dolores Pendell, who has just retired after 32 years of being the main support staff in Cornell's Center for Applied Mathematics (CAM). Dolores held the place together (and even had to put up with me for 4 years in my grad student days) and is now moving on to richly-deserved free time and other adventures. Because of Dolores, CAM was always a well-oiled machine. I have been in places with excellent support staff as well as ones with poor support staff, and the difference between the two (as felt by the academics) is absolutely huge. I think a lot of scientists don't realize this, but we're not exactly the ones who keep this stuff running and we really depend on other people behind the scenes making our lives easier so that we can do research, teach, etc. Having good people there makes all the difference in the world.

So, congratulations and enjoy!

Some Snippets of Snarkiness from my Doctoral Dissertation

I was telling some people on Saturday about one of the many snarky things I did in my doctoral dissertation. I was just looking at my copy of my dissertation and reminiscing about the many snarky things I did with that document.

For example, the version I kept and the version I left in the Center for Applied Mathematics has the title "Quantum Chaos in Vibrating Billiard Systems: Version 2". (The 'Version 2' part isn't in the title in the official copies, but I placed it there after I was asked for Version 2.0 instead of 1.1 after I showed 1.0 to my thesis committee. I had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch in about 5 weeks---I made it by one day---and I was feeling extremely bitter.)

My Biographical Sketch in the thesis started off with the following quote from Scott Adams: "Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion." Of course, I wrote that thinking that science and perhaps even trying to get a Ph.D. also belonged there. I write this blog entry now with the knowledge that things have paid off for me quite well scientifically. I had forgotten that I used that quote, and I certainly didn't think I'd be where I am now when I wrote it. I had some other quotes at the top of that section as well, but I'll ignore them. Then I had a bunch of other stuff in the biographical sketch (some series, some not so serious), which I ended with the following words: "Mason has promised to continue his misadventures and remain someone who is distinctive and easily-remembered (even if not always fondly so). Meanwhile, he plans to go outside and frolic." I think I have mostly kept this promise, at least when it comes to the first sentence.

Then came my Dedication: "To my friends, who have always been able to figure out when to boot me in the head. Honorable mention goes to the Los Angeles Dodgers." This too remains rather accurate, though I think my precise phrasing would be slightly different now.

I have a couple of other quotes at the beginning of the Acknowledgements section (one serious and one snarky). I wrote a rather long section because that's the main thing that people looking at my dissertation will actually read. :) I was occasionally quite snarky, but I was sometimes serious as well and I mentioned many of my best friends by name. I separately mentioned friends and other people who helped me with various thesis-related things along the way.

Perhaps my favorite line comes from the one-sentence paragraph with which I ended my Acknowledgements. (This is the one I was conveying on Saturday.) I had looked at several dissertations while I was writing mine up and many of them thanked god. One of them had particularly irked me because it spent 1 sentence thanking wife and kids and then two pages thanking god. I was thus inspired (also with more than a little inspiration from the fact that Michael Berry would often write at the end of his papers that no money from military organizations contributed to the research) to end my Acknowledgements as follows: This dissertation was completed without assistance or inspiration from any deities, as no such beings exist.

Then of course we got to less interesting stuff like my table of contents, list of figures, and scientific chapters.

In the copy I left for Cornell's Center for Applied Mathematics, I left an additional easter egg that I wrote in handwriting. It basically said that I didn't mind how the thesis was used as long as it wasn't used for toilet paper. Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact phrasing.

Take that, Open Access Journal!

Sometimes one just has to prove a point, as a Cornell graduate student has recently done with one particular open-access journal by submitting a hoax paper that was written algorithmically. For some of you, this incident should ring familiar, as physicist Alan Sokal submitted a hoax article in 1996 to attempt to prove his opinion that a certain field of study was crap.

One thing that really interests me is that I found out about this via Cornell University's official Facebook posting. I think it's awesome to prove the point because sometimes that's just what needs to be done, but I'm a bit surprised that the University would be willing to publicly endorse the action. This incident might have some interesting fallout... (Hopefully, it won't include the grad student's career, because I suspect it's easier for a well-known person like Sokal to continue professional scientific endeavors after such a stunt than it might be for somebody who is trying to establish him/herself.

10th Anniversary of Cornell's Famous Pumpkin Prank

I wrote a blog entry about pranks recently and I neglected to mention that October 2007 marked the 10th anniversary of the great pumpkin prank at Cornell (my grad school alma mater).

Somehow, a group of students got a HUGE pumpkin on the top of Cornell's McGraw Tower spire (where the chimes get played), which is an extremely tall building. The thing probably wouldn't have stayed up very long, but the weather got really cold, which caused the pumpkin to freeze and stay on the tower. The pumpkin then stayed on top of the tower until the weather warmed up in the spring. It fell down one or two days before my visit as a prospective graduate student (evidently in a blooper during an attempt to take it down). Sigh... I just missed seeing that wonderful sight in person.

The pumpkin continued to decay over the years and "The last extant piece of the gourd sat beside a brain display in the Department of Psychology." (That sentence just amuses the Hell out of me.)

Anyway, given my association with Caltech pranks, I feel remiss in not having previously told this story on my blog and only my recent Cornell alumni newsletter reminded me of this awesome prank. It's still not known who the perpetrators were and I believe that how they did it might not be known either. (There was an article in The Cornell Daily Sun late in my graduate-school career that -- without identifying the perps -- claimed to state how the pumpkin was hoisted atop the tower, but my understanding is that a nontrivial number of people were disputing the purported methodology.